


A Strange Kind of Love

by crowleyshouseplant



Category: Jurassic Park (1993), Jurassic Park (Movies), Jurassic World (2015)
Genre: Gen, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-15
Updated: 2015-06-15
Packaged: 2018-04-04 11:53:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4136475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowleyshouseplant/pseuds/crowleyshouseplant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Owen is first hired as a velociraptor behavioral researcher, he comes across the journal of Robert Muldoon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Strange Kind of Love

After you're first hired to be the dinosaur expert you always dreamed you could be when you were like five years old, you don't know what to say, and you ask if you can take a few days to think about it. They say sure but we need to know soon--a job like this can't sit unfilled for long and there are other people who would jump at such an amazing opportunity. You can hear the accusation in their voice. Why aren't you jumping too? Why don't you want it as bad as the next one? Not just everybody gets a job like this. Not just anybody could be someone like you for this job. You hear that you should be grateful. You hear yourself say that you'll give them an answer tomorrow morning. Fine, they say, and you don't think it's fine at all.

You sit on the bed real quiet like. You twist the covers in your fist and you think about the dinosaurs and the labs that brewed them up and you think about all those caged living things and you feel a little sick. You wonder if your morals could stand working for a company like them, that doesn't respect living things, and you fall onto your back laughing because you just got out of the navy and where was the moral high ground in that? 

You think that you are tired of hunting. You think that you are tired of killing. You think that you should say no but your heart thrills quietly because they're right. When you were born, this would never have been possible. This job would never have been possible. Dinosaurs would never have been possible. This is the past and the future in the present, and you're giddy with the possibility of it.

You call them up the next morning and take the job. Nobody could be more thrilled. You are and you're sick and you refuse to think about the dissonance as you pack. 

They show you around. You see the raptors you'll be caring for for the first time. They're still in the egg. You crouch so you can see them right up close and personal. The machine turns them regularly, rhythmically. You wonder if the raptors in the eggs know there's nothing of their natural habitat here. For some reason, you think of the home you've not been to in years, of the parents you've not spoken to in months, and something seizes in your chest and you can barely think straight. Later, you ask Dr Wu if you can bring something of you to the nest--an old white tee already worn with holes and cut to ribbons, you think--and he pauses for a moment, pencil nub tapping his clip board. He says yes. Then adds that he thinks that would be a good idea. It's not something the other guy thought about.

You want to ask about the other guy but you don't. You already know he's dead from the past tense and the way Dr. Wu tensed and shifted. You almost want to ask how he died but you're too afraid that Dr. Wu will say by raptor.

You go back to the quarters they've set up for the live in staff and you find the rattiest tee you own. You tear it into tiny strips and you think about the bird nests you've seen. Dr. Grant always said the raptors have a lot in common with birds. You hope for some reason that the smell of you will sink through their thick hard shells, that even before you're summoned when they bust out of that shell, they'll already know you. 

As well as a bird of prey can know someone lower than them on the food chain, that is. 

You come back with the bits of tee that smell like you, that are you--you when you sweated through bootcamp, you when you graduated under your fine naval uniform, you when you pulled up the weeds in your mom's garden when you went on leave because her back couldn't take it anymore, and you when you first stepped on this island, when you were nearly blinded with a bright sun and could feel the breath of the dinosaurs like thunder against your skin. An orderly tosses a leather bound journal, pages yellow and brown with what you hope is just age, and tells you that Dr. Wu left it. You tuck it in your pocket, strew the clinical raptor nest with the torn up tee, and then go up to the roof. Not even smokers go up here because no smoking allowed on this island. You settle down and open the journal. You'll thank Dr Wu when you see him again. 

It's the other guy. His name was Robert Muldoon, Jurassic Park's first game warden, and he wrote in a crisp, careful print that was easy to read. At first you think this was his journal chronicling the way the raptors grew, the way the raptors acted. It is that, but it is also something more. It is personal. It is a story. And you are afraid of how it ends.

***

Robert's pager beeped at his waist while he was eating lunch--something quick and microwavable since the gourmet food cooked by the fancy chefs was for the clients and later the visitors they wanted to wow and impress. It was the raptors--they were hatching. He didn't even finish his lunch before he was on his feet, taking stairs two at a time to reach the lab.

Somehow, Hammond always managed to beat him there and today was no exception. Dressed all in white--Robert supposed he could afford to wear white because he was able to pay other people to do his dirty work--he was already pulling the gloves on over his hands, cane tucked neatly under his arm. The eggs were trembling, their shells splitting like cracked earth. Robert stood to the side, his arms crossed against his chest as Hammond helped the raptor out of his egg, plucking bits of shell from the thing's head as he cooed at them. Dr. Wu pressed plastic gloves into his own hands and he slowly pulled them on, standing beside Hammond as Hammond transferred the baby raptor into his cupped palms.

The poor thing screamed and cried. 

Robert wondered if all children hated to be born, to be thrust into a world they did not know.

Perhaps it was worse for these raptors. The world had moved on. It didn't need them anymore--and yet, here they were because someone had wanted them again and snapped his fingers to make it happen. Had looked at them and said I want you back on this earth and so help me god I will make sure it happens no matter what, no matter the cost, spare no expense.

The raptor screamed from his hands, its curved claws, too soft and pliable to be deadly, scraping at his gloves. 

"Oh don't be like that," Hammond censured, already holding the second raptor of the clutch. "You need to reassure it. You need to welcome it back home. It's only been 65 million years after all!"

Robert looked down at it once more. "What a good little raptor," he said, dryly. "What a good girl."

Hammond's face beamed. "There, you have it! Go on now, meet them all."

All told there were eight raptors hatched that day. The smallest of them only cried a little and stopped when Robert held her. He held her up so that they could be eye to eye and she quieted. Her unblinking gaze fixed on his and he could have sworn he saw something there--a thoughtfulness, perhaps. "Hmm," he said as he set her down so that they could be cared for.

He visited the eight raptors every day. They grew fast and, all too soon, Robert learned that they were dangerous, and that Hammond being there at birth so that the raptors would imprint on him was bullshit. The raptors would just as soon eat him as any of the live animals that were sent to their deaths--pigs, chickens, goats the like. Robert supervised the feeding from the ground level, where he could see them hunting. Once, he noticed that they were clustered near the door where the living meat was led through. The one he'd held, the one who'd hardly screamed at all, was there--but she wasn't looking at lunch. She was looking at the handlers. She was looking at the buttons they pressed on the gate. She was looking at their hands. She was looking at everything but what she was supposed to be eating, what she was supposed to be hunting.

Robert's eyes narrowed.

He stopped the feeding and submitted a request that they renovate the feeding system and design so that they would not be required to open the perimeter fence. Hammond told him he was being over dramatic. 

The next day, a raptor took a chunk of flesh from a man who barely lived to tell the tale. Robert asked which one it was and they pointed at the raptor who had already grown very big and very fast. "We should put her down," Robert advised. "She's gotten a taste for it. It'll never be safe for anyone." 

They're dinosaurs, Hammond insisted, not a trained attraction at a petting zoo. People knew the dangers when they signed their employment papers--it was all right there. Robert had read his own contract--all in complicated legalese and jargon that adequately stated the dangers one faced during one's employment there--if one had the patience and the knowledge to interpret that sort of speak. Hammond wouldn't have the raptor put down. She was too valuable. Too precious. A historical living artifact of a lost world. More, she was an investment for scientific advancement and the future of the park, and little accidents such as these were to be expected along the way. Instead, he paid a lot of money to the worker and it all went away for a little while.

Robert went to Dr. Wu to see if they had tried to control the behavior of the dinosaurs. Wu said that they tried to navigate the line of what was real and what was crafted. That of course they had considered the behavior of predators and had attempted to modify it for the sake of safety but that ultimately Hammond was looking for something authentic. This did not surprise Robert in the least and he felt that Wu held similar reservations--during their conversation, his bearing was strained, as though he and Hammond disagreed, but Robert did not ask for further details. But even if Wu had told him that they had bred the dinosaurs to be gentler, to be domesticated, Robert knew that it wouldn't stop--that there wouldn't be accidents anymore but incidences of predatory behavior that couldn't be out manufactured by any lab. He went to the Park and insisted that the paddock have stricter security. Higher fences. Multiple safeguards. "They cannot get out," he stressed. "They cannot be allowed anywhere near a human." 

Hammond only started to agree that the raptors were more dangerous than he had previously realized when their raptor pack of eight turned into a raptor pack of seven. 

They found her standing over the eighth's body, her jaws red, her eyes cold and gleaming, locked on Robert as they gazed at the shredded corpse of what had once been their largest raptor. The flies spiraled the carcass and the smell was sickening.

Robert demanded to see video footage of the kill and Dennis very obligingly pulled it up, almost laughing when he saw it again. "Wait, this is my favorite part," he said, gesturing at the screen and pausing. The biggest raptor was used to having the largest chunk of whatever lunch they were given. Frequently, she would stretch out her neck to snap up food from the other seven--but this time, when she did, his raptor who had been hunkering over the hunks of meat none of the others had wanted, crouched so low to the ground it was easy to miss her, had leapt forward, back claws shredding the earth and the green grass as she ripped out its throat before the raptor even knew it was being hunted by one of its own.

And then, after she was done and there was nothing but the blood and the corpse and the nervous yelps from the other raptors, she twisted her head around so she could look directly at the camera, smiling in the unsettling way that all raptors smiled.

"Clever," Robert said, his voice quiet. 

Dennis laughed. "Yeah, it's almost as if she actually knows the camera is there. Couldn't have asked for a better view of the kill. You know how much money we could get if we leaked this thing? I mean, not that I would, but I'm just saying--hypothetically--that we could."

One by one the raptors died until there were only two others with the Big One at their head. "Why do you call her that?" Hammond asked as Robert watched videos of the Big One attacking the fence, shaking off the shock before they attacked another place and then another and another. At first, they focused their attention on the gates that now never opened (and how could they remember that once they had opened), but then they began to systematically test the entire perimeter. "She's hardly the biggest raptor we've ever had--more's the pity."

"Because she's our biggest threat," Robert turned from the screen. "They should all be killed." Every day he told Hammond the raptors must go. Every day Hammond told him the raptors stayed and that if it came down to Robert or the raptors, well he could always find another game warden that would properly appreciate everything they did here, everything they had already accomplished.

Sometimes Robert went to the paddock, and sometimes the Big One slipped from the trees so she could let him see her watching from behind her side of the fence. He paced the perimeter and she would slip back into the undergrowth and he would think he was alone until he found her waiting for him by the spots he would check more periodically than the rest, the weak spots the raptors wouldn't leave alone, the spots they worried at. She would rise from the grass, trying to scare him. Every time he flinched, she made the strange clucking sound in her throat, bobbing her head, and he heard the return calls of the other two, shrieking echoes that made his heart go-go-go and he had to remember that he could not let her see his fear. Irrationally, he wondered if she knew that he was always telling people that the raptors must go, that they must all be destroyed--that she knew he was always afraid of them and what they could do if they ever figured out how to escape. That even on those rare days he went off island, his thoughts always ghosted toward them: were they safely locked away, had they killed anyone today, had they gotten free, what would happen if they got free, if they ever, ever got free. He walked towards her, going too close to the fence so that if it had been anyone else he would have fired them for refusing to adhere to the safety regulations he had drawn up after the first incident. He wondered if she could trick him into accidentally electrocuting himself. A well placed scare could, after all, send him reeling until it was too late to catch his balance and then gravity would help him along until she could finish the job. He figured that she could probably pull him through the gaps in the wire, even if she couldn't make it through herself. 

They stared at each other for a long time until she flicked her tail and disappeared back into the tall grass. He wondered how he could be so stupid to have patterns of behavior of his own that she could identify and exploit. He would need to stop that. Would need to make his inspections more spontaneous, unplanned, random and without pattern. 

"The raptors need to go," Robert told Hammond before he went out to schmooze more people into investing more money into this death trap of a park.

Hammond sighed as he leaned wearily on his cane. "What did they do now?"

"It's not what did they do today, but what they've done in the past and what they'll do in the future."

Hammond waved his hand. Everything was fine. He was making such a big deal. Why, if he didn't know better, it was almost as if Robert was more afraid of them than was absolutely proper for a game warden of his calibre. 

Robert left without answering the obvious bait. He went and looked down at the raptor paddock and wondered if the Big One was looking up at him. 

Not even when the Big One killed the gatekeeper did Hammond refuse to relent. "Shoot her," Robert had screamed over and over, "shoot her" and still she lived. Shoot her, he told Hammond again after it had happened and they were trying to come up with new solutions and new programs to keep the handlers safe from the dinosaurs they transported and cared for. Shoot her and the rest of her pack in the head and forbid your lab from cooking up anymore raptors, he said again when the lawyers came with their concerns and their requirements and their demands even though they never demanded the obvious.

Instead, Hammond's solution was to bring in experts to stamp their approval on the science that he'd revolutionized and the dinosaurs he had frankensteined from the past into the present. Robert watched from the sidelines, watched to see if he could tell which way these experts with their fancy degrees would swing as they took their carefully planned tours. While Hammond was concerned with their gourmet lunches, they saw the destruction the raptors wreaked, the dangers they posed. They were unsettled. Good, Robert thought, because maybe they could convince Hammond that the raptors must go. Surely if anyone could convince Hammond to make the right choice it would be them. Hammond would not choose the raptors over the existence of the Park.

But then, when everything went to shit, and it was just him and Ellie and the raptors on an island without fences, without containment, he knew he'd reached the end of line. The raptors would ignore Ellie until they had dealt with him--or he had dealt with them; that much he knew.

He walked softly. The heat and the fear made his palms sweat but he tried not to focus on that. Instead tried to focus on every shift of the leaves. Tried to remember every strategy the Big One had always used. He knew they were here, knew they were near--there were no bird calls. The world had gone absolutely silent except for his breath. And then he saw one of them--right there, ahead of him in the trees. It wasn't the Big One and disappointment cracked through him as he prepared to fire.

He thought that she'd be the one now that there was no fence to separate them. 

After all, she had always been the one looking at him--looking up at him from his hand, looking back at him after she killed her alpha because somehow she knew he would be watching from the eye of the camera, looking at him through the perimeter fences. 

He put his hat on the log so that he could concentrate and see properly. He prepared the gun to fire. He wondered where she was. Perhaps he had miscalculated and Ellie was--no. He couldn't think about that. I've got you, he thought, relieved that finally someone was going to shoot one of them as they should have been shot ages ago. When he was done here, he'd hunt down the other two.

To his left, the leaves parted and out of the corner of his eye, he saw her. The Big One with the fang-lined smile all raptors had. But this time, he thought, it was a little toothier, a little bigger, a little more satisfied.

She only allowed him a moment to recognize her. Not since she had broken her egg shell had they been this close. He could feel her breath on his face. He heard the soft clucking in her throat, the sound she made when she was excited, when she had closed in on the hunt.

"Clever girl--" but it was too late.

***

Or, at least, that's how you imagine it went down as you read through every report Robert Muldoon had ever made about the raptors and the Big One's rise to the head of the pack. You read through his meticulous notes, every incident documented and peppered with questions and ideas to contain the raptors. You can see the anxiety bleeding through the pages. The raptors always on his mind. 

You hope it won't come down to that. At the end of the hand written pages which only filled half the journal, someone had put newspaper clippings. One of them was Robert's obituary. Others covered the various lawsuits over the years. Robert Muldoon had no family to sue for him. There was a hand scribbled note signed by Dr. Wu. They had tinkered with the genetic code. They think the raptors aren't as dangerous now. They're so excited to see the results of their engineering.

You think they're stupid for breeding raptors after what had happened. You wonder if you'll change into Muldoon.

As the eggs hatch and you're there for the first time, you convince yourself that you aren't Muldoon. You respect these creatures, and sometimes you think you'll fear them--but not today as you hold these newborn creatures in your gloved hands. You do what Muldoon never did and name them. You're not foolish enough to name them like they're your pets, but you give them something you can call them by: Charlie, Delta, and Echo. You try to call the one with the blue stripe Beta but for some reason you can't. You find yourself calling her Blue more and more often and it sticks even though you tell yourself over and over that it's probably a bad idea. But you go along with it, and you structure yourself into their pack as their alpha. Sometimes, you think of it as your pack and you wonder if that's wise too. You are there with them when they are babies and when they are young. You socialize them so that they have more than high walls and themselves and regular feedings to look forward to, to relate to. You play games with them, and they love the games you play, the real puzzlers they need to solve. The harder it is, the happier they are. As they start to grow bigger (so fast, so much), you know you won't be able to stay on the ground with them for much longer. You instruct that the paddock be built with overhead ramps (high enough that they can't jump onto it) so that you are above them instead of behind a fence, so that they'll remember that you're still part of their pack, that you are still their alpha no matter how big and dangerous they become.

Even though they need to be caged now in muzzles made of iron, you still visit them. You know where Blue liked to be scratched the most. You know that raptors have grooming rituals and you perform them--when it's safe for you to do so. You know they're happy when their eyes go half-lidded, when they relax even for a moment. You wonder if their thoughts race as quickly as their feet, if they snap up new ideas as quickly as they'd eat you. Her breath is hot against your hand and you wish they were young again, so that they could scrape their rough tongues against your knuckles once more. But it's silly to think like that because these animals might be features in an amusement park, but they're not tame. They're not domesticated. They are who they are--even if you don't always know what that might mean.

Sometimes, after you toss Blue a rat for doing such a good job, for being such a good girl, you catch her staring at you with a look in her eye. You wonder if Muldoon would recognize it, if he had seen it before with the Big One. You swallow hard. You're not afraid. You know who these creatures are--they are raptors and they are Blue, Charlie, Delta, and Echo--and you know who you are. You press your clicker and they're all looking up at you now, muscles tensed and ready to run.  

You also know that your place in the pack could change at any moment--but today is not that day as you watch them race towards the finish line on your mark.

 


End file.
